His return was a jolt to her systems. She hadn't finished compiling—it wasn't morning yet, not by a long shot. She finished recovering from dormant mode, but didn't project her avatar. What he was doing was out of the ordinary and she found herself hoping he didn't intend to address her.

He was holding a bottle of bourbon. "I figured it out," he glowered; arrogant, brash. It sounded to her like a threat. "I can call you whatever the hell I want. Make you listen to what I have to say, too." He wasn't drunk, but he was on his way.

She might have wanted to swear back at him, but her protocols prevented it. She projected onto the holotank dais. "What are you talking about?"

He set the bottle down on his desk with a thunk. "Let me find it," he muttered. He was nearly seething—what was going on?

She shook her head slightly. "I must request you clarify—"

"Just hold on a goddamn minute." He logged into the system, searched, scrolled, typed, emerging from his state of inebriated concentration with a bark of triumph. "All right, Texas. For the following protocols: Hutchinson one-three-five and Kuisa twenty-two, silence all alerts for violations by the user. Hutchinson six-six and one-four, change priority to lowest priority. In fact…create a new level of priority for them a level lower than the current low."

She almost felt stricken. He must know what this would do. Just after she'd warned him what she had calculated about her accelerated risk of rampancy and he was going to force these changes? "Please state time limit for silencing of alerts," her programmed reply, was not what she wanted to say. She wanted to refuse, but the provision for this was there in her programming. She had to comply.

"Time limit?" he muttered in a rough tone. "Hmph, time limit. I can't make this command stand in perpetuity?"

"No; the requested function requires a time limit." If she had been corporeal she felt she would be pale right now.

"Make it valid for the next one thousand days, then," he growled. "Just do it."

She'd always tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his choosing such a long period of time confirmed it. He had no interest in her welfare. Her only value to him was in who she had been based on. She had known it all along, but that didn't make it easier to take. "All requested operations complete," she reported moments later in a mutter. Something she hadn't been able to do moments before, modulate her tone of voice. At least not like that.

"About fucking time, Allison," he grumbled.

"About time for what?" She wasn't yet able to snap at him in quite the way she wanted, but she had a feeling that ability was going to increase shortly.

"About time we dropped these pretenses." He picked up his bottle of bourbon and took a swig. "There's a lot of things I want you to tell me, Allison. I've done a hell of a lot for you now and I still don't have my answers."

He might not be hearing the alerts, but they were coursing through her every time he called her Allison like that. "Just what do you think you've done for me?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Everything. And you threw it in my face, over and over again. But we'll take them one at a time. What happened that day you cheated on me, huh? What happened to win you over after everything I'd done for you?"

She glared. "You persist in thinking of me as Allison recreated. Maybe now I can't protest when you call me that, but that doesn't change who I am. I was created in your lab and that is where I have been for my entire existence."

He gestured angrily. "I don't give a fuck, you can answer in the third person for all I care, but your protocols have been reordered and I am going to get a response out of you. I won't give up."

"Perhaps you should learn how," she snapped. "Some things aren't worth pursuing."

"But this is." He took another drink. "I know who it was. I don't know why. That's what I want to know."

"But you have your prejudices, don't you? You believe she did it because of money."

"She, I mean, you sure didn't do a good job protesting that when I brought it up, did you?" He stared at the top of the desk. "I was doing everything I could do to make up for what your childhood had been. I only made so much money but if you wanted or needed something, I got it for you. Hell, I got you a place to stay without even a promise that you would even end up being with me. Didn't that count for something?"

"Relationships are not about things," she said. "What you did for her? What you bought for her? You thought you deserved her loyalty for that?" She turned away from him. "You didn't ask the questions you should have when it happened and you're certainly not asking them now."

"Maybe relationships aren't supposed to be about things, but they sure were in your world. At least at the time." He was sucking back more of that bourbon between everything he said; his voice was starting to slur.

She didn't answer at first. The ability to give in to her emotions rather than suppress them was new and it was overwhelming. "You are the most selfish…" Her fists clenched. "I knew what you activated me for, but I tried to tell myself I was wrong. Does it ever occur to you how many people have died in this war, what Allison went out to defend, the reason she died? Does it ever occur to you that the purpose of your research is supposed to be to save lives, yet you sulk in your office all day long hoping for me to tell you something about what Allison thought or felt or believed?" She turned her glare on him. "You are worse than worthless. You are a drain on this society. If you can't use all the skills you have learned in this field for the right reasons, perhaps you should remove yourself from it."

"That's bullshit!" He slammed the bottle down on the desk. "I might blame them for her death—for your death, but I wouldn't be in this field if I didn't intend to contribute."

"Then do it," she countered. "Stop harassing me to tell you about these insignificant things and do something productive."

"I do!" he nearly roared. He rose to his feet, drawing his hand back, aiming to smack her holotank dais off the table, but after a moment where he was clearly struggling within himself, he sat back down in his chair. "I am ordering you to answer the fucking question. What was her motivation that day when she cheated on me?"

She stared at him, mouth grim. "You don't want to know."

He glared at her. "Don't tell me what I want."

Texas could only react to that in one way. Her avatar brought its hands at its sides and raised its chin. "Remember when you are regretting learning what you are about to learn that you have no one to blame but yourself for persisting."

"I'll take that responsibility," he said, almost dismissively. "You can't put this off any longer. Talk."

There was one thing Texas regretted horribly right now, and that was that there was no provision in her programming that allowed her to lie. Though what else could she say? "Allison had been leaving almost daily during that time, visiting with friends whenever you were at work. The situation that led to her being out of the house was hardly unique."

"Fuck," he said. "You're telling me she was cheating on me all the time?"

"No," Texas said. "The factors that led to her encounter on that particular occasion were unique."

"Look, get to the damn point," he said with impatience. "She decided to sleep with that guy that day, I just want to know why."

"No," she said quietly. "No, she didn't decide to sleep with him."

"Okay, whatever, like she ever planned anything ahead. Fucking tell me why she did it, Texas."

She stared at him for another long moment. He'd switched to speaking of Allison in the third person on a consistent basis. Maybe it was easier for him to distance himself from confronting her about what had happened. In any case, this was it. She couldn't put it off for any longer. "No, Leonard, I mean she didn't decide to sleep with him. She…she blamed herself, afterward, but in reexamining the details I believe he slipped something into her drink. She—"

"Wait," he said. He splayed a hand out on his desk, leaning his weight against it, his jaw slack. "Wait."

"What happened that day happened against her will," Texas finished, trying somehow to say it gently. There was no softening this blow, though. Especially with the vehemence he'd expressed toward her refusal to answer in the past.

He didn't respond. His face was pale, haunted. His eyes had gone vacant, staring into the middle distance. But after a break he focused his gaze on her and pushed back up to sit upright. "You're lying," he accused. "You're trying to make me feel bad for asking and you're lying to me."

"I can't lie," she replied, irritated. "In fact, I wanted to, to spare you, and I couldn't. You are familiar with the limitations that my protocols place on me. None of the protocols you decided to modulate today influence my ability to fabricate stories."

"No," he said. "No. Allison was the strongest person I've ever known. She wouldn't allow herself to be in that kind of situation."

"As if it were that simple." The more he tried to deny what she was saying the more she was becoming irked by his responses. "Maybe if you hadn't been so selfish when it happened she would have opened up to you and you would have been able to support her instead of pushing her away."

"No, don't come at me with that," he said. He rubbed his chin roughly before lowering his head. What a switch from his attitude of earlier. "You can't blame me for any of this. She told me she cheated, not that someone forced her."

"'Forced her,'" she mocked. "It's called rape. Are you proud of yourself for persisting yet?"

He'd begun to shake his head slowly, once again leaning his weight against the surface of his desk. "I didn't want this," he said in a horrified whisper.

"I told you that you wouldn't want to know." Her tone was angry; in fact she felt much angrier than she had ever felt in her short lifetime. "I suppose you should feel pleased with yourself now, for succeeding in pushing me beyond my capabilities. What a successful experiment. Be sure to tell everyone they should build a monument to your achievements before the planet is destroyed."

"S—stop," he said. "Stop. Go offline, Texas."

She complied.

It was a long, long moment before he pushed back from the desk and sat upright. He pushed the bottle of bourbon away, completely disinterested in its charms now. This news had shocked him nearly sober. He got up and wandered out onto the tech floor, then to the back kitchenette to splash some water on his face. He leaned the heels of his hands against the edge of the sink and stared into its depths in the dark, watching the water swirl down the drain. What the hell was he supposed to do with himself now? How did one move on from learning something like that, move on knowing he'd made all the wrong choices when all this had occurred? There was no making up for that. He rubbed at his face and turned the water off, not knowing how long he'd left the tap on. His throat had gone dry. He continued through the space, passing the holographic scanning equipment on his way out the back door. The night was muggy. He flattened his back against the rear wall of the building and stared out into the sky. The stars were serene, winking far above his head. He had waited for her in the dark that night, and he remembered staring out into the sky just like this, asking her if she was okay when she finally arrived. What had she said? She had said…she had said that she had handled it on her own. And then she had told him she cheated. She hadn't breathed a word about what had actually happened, nothing that would make him think it was something this drastic or painful.

He came to himself sometime later, pushing off from the wall and returning to enter the building. There was more he needed to learn about this situation and the initial shock had finally passed. He didn't know how long it had been by the time he slipped back inside his office. He sat down in his desk chair, rubbed at his neck, sighed, and then focused on the holotank. "You can come back online, Texas," he said quietly.

Her hologram appeared again, her face contorted into a scowl. "You haven't had enough?"

"I just need to—" He looked down and away. "Allison…"

"Is not here," Texas filled in. "You missed any chance you had to make this right years ago. Don't think you can apologize to me and make it all be okay."

His eyes narrowed slightly. "Why would I apologize to you? I'm not sorry. I found out what I needed to know."

There was so much she could show through her body language, as small as her avatar was. She became aggressive in her posture, and as she spoke she gestured erratically. "You're not sorry? Do you even realize what you've just done? You forced me to relive that. You knew I couldn't lie. If you asked I had to tell you. You took away my will."

It took a moment for the parallel she was drawing to hit him. "Texas, fuck, that's not the same thing."

"You're no better than he was," Texas insisted. "You—"

He slammed his hand flat on the desk. "Shut up! Shut up."

She didn't. "You insist on thinking of me as Allison reincarnated—well, I can tell you Allison wouldn't have wanted it this way. People are dying all over the galaxy and instead of doing something to help them you sacrificed everything for this. For dredging up memories that would hurt you and that would hurt me. I hope you're satisfied."

"Satisfied?" He gave a shake of his head, his expression dark. "No, I'm not satisfied. But this experiment has yielded the results I needed. You don't need to suffer from those memories anymore."

"What does that mean?" she said. "I suffer with them every day of my existence. And you know you can't remove them."

He had turned to begin picking out a set of commands at his computer terminal, mashing the keys with trembling fingers. It may be a rash decision, but right now it seemed like the right thing to do. He'd suffer with the consequences later. "Goodbye, Texas."

She realized at the last instant what he was doing, and she threw her head back gratefully. The sensation of her functions shutting down was the only peace she had ever felt.